The stories in Talking in the Dark read like small novels: the worlds they imagine are that layered and complete. Each examination of the underside of love-from endurance and betrayal to sacrifice, obsession, and abandonment-evokes images of lowered voices and shared confessions. The deepest chords of intimacy echo throughout this moving and, finally, hopeful book.A single mother, haunted by loneliness and self-doubt, sleeps with her daughter's teenage boyfriend, and, in a scene of frightening family tension, turns her rage not toward the husband who abandoned her, but toward her daughter. A young tennis player experiencing her first love becomes the victim of a young man's dangerous obsession. An elderly widower becomes the target of a materialistic younger woman. Laura Glen Louis's language is spare and precise, sometimes filled with the subterfuges of desire and need, sometimes vibrant with the hope of love's birth or rebirth, sometimes counterpointed by tenderness and alienation. Hers is a new voice, but one that arrives fully mature--incisive, unsparing, and enlightening.